Alaska News

Despite rough working conditions, Hooper Bay carver puts his mark on bones and ivory

HOOPER BAY – In a wind-hammered house on the frozen edge of the Bering Sea, in a tiny closet housing a broken old furnace, just past the bathroom with no running water, Steven Stone hunches over driftwood and whale bone, walrus ivory and prehistoric mastodon tusks to make something new.

The home is like many in this big coastal village but the family has some advantages in a place where jobs are few. Stone's wife, Christine, works as on-site coordinator of the Head Start program in Hooper Bay.

Stone, a Yup'ik carver, is hoping at age 53 to make it as an artist recognized beyond the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, where he already has earned success. Some creations emerge from collaboration with Christine, a basket maker, and others he does on his own, engineering bones, ivory, wood and baleen into his designs.

His work is on display in the Bethel Regional High School principal's office and it's seemingly everywhere in the Hooper Bay School, bought through the state percent for art program after the new building opened in 2006. The modern school with a dramatic open rafter dining hall overlooks tundra and the now-frozen bay. A raging fire destroyed the old school and dozens of other buildings including homes.

A bowhead vertebra sculpture of a great hunter wearing snow goggles sits in the school library. A walrus skull with carved tusks hangs in a Yup'ik classroom as does a puffin mask. Hunters in wooden kayaks and a grass basket by Christine with a walrus ivory finial, or top, are among the pieces in a display case.

"I try to make all my work related to my ancestor lifestyle and how they grew up, how they lived, how they (do) subsistence," Stone said. He uses ivory from walruses he has hunted or that he collects along the beach. He's found a spot inland for mastodon tusks. In this part of Alaska, hunters target belugas but not other whales. Carcasses wash up and he collects the whale bones.

Sea grass and Gorilla Glue

Detail in his work connects to culture. Some of his kayak sculptures hold small sleds that hunters would have used to drag the vessel over portages. Two white puffballs of rabbit fur hang by strips of seal skin from the great hunter's mouth, symbols of bubbles that rise up when a bearded seal sounds its mating call.

ADVERTISEMENT

"That guy is a real good hunter catching maklaks, the one that is real big and black, that goes underwater doing a lot of bubbling and making that unique noise," Stone said. Hunters can use oars to listen for the underwater call.

Stone designed a special top for Christine's tightly coiled grass baskets. He cuts a disk -- from walrus ivory, mastodon tusks or sometimes baleen -- then drills holes all around the edge, openings for Christine to weave grass through and connect the disk to the basket. He uses Gorilla Super Glue to attach his carved ivory figures including walrus heads, seal heads, ulus and small bears to the disks as finials for the basket lids.

"I'm the first one ever who designed this," said Stone, who unlike many in Yup'ik culture is not shy about either accomplishments or ambitions. He's also working a new design for a mask that will incorporate a grass basket, another first, he said.

Maine collector

Retired nurse Jean Rohrer, who lives in Southwest Harbor, Maine, and collects grass baskets from tribal artists in New England's Wabanaki confederation among others, was visiting a friend in Hooper Bay a few years back when she spotted Stone's work at the school. She ordered a grass basket with an ivory walrus topper that she got about six months later.

"It's actually the showpiece in my collection," Rohrer said. The basket itself is especially tightly woven but the carving makes it unique. "It's gorgeous," she said.

Earlier this year, Stone taught a workshop in how make a harpoon for hunting seal and walrus and an uluaq, the curved knife that non-Natives usually call an ulu. The class was through the community's year-old learning center, a federally funded satellite of the Kuskokwim campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks that serves Hooper Bay, Scammon Bay and Chevak with college classes, vocational training and art workshops.

"The outcome was real good," Stone told the learning center's advisory board at a recent meeting in Hooper Bay."Those students learned right away."

Stone learned his craft from his parents and from elders at the old Hooper Bay school when he was a student there.

"My parents used to tell us when you work on something, just think as if you are going to own it," Stone said. "We try to make them real nice."

His work isn't cheap. Baskets with ivory tops start at $1,500.

Freezers of seal and fish

At home, Stone squeezes into his workspace and runs an extension cord into the bathroom, where the shower is now a closet and the toilet is lined with a plastic garbage bag for use as a honey bucket. Eight people live there now. Stone uses small electrical drills and saws -- faster than traditional carving tools -- and wears a surgical mask to protect against dust.

"The little place where I work is not real adequate," he said. He is applying for a Rasmuson Foundation grant that he would use to build a workshop.

In summer, the family is busy gathering food. The Stones have five children, all now young adults and some with their own children. In freezers, they store greens gathered from the tundra, beluga whale, seal, walrus, whitefish, lush fish, king and chum salmon, pike and various birds. The home itself is stuffed with boxes and clothes, boots and fur hats.

In the winter, he carves. Now he is working on new, big sculptures. One features a hunter in a seal-gut raincoat with an ivory face detailed down to pupils made of baleen and eyelashes from ptarmigan feathers. The sculpture will include a seal skin buoy. In old times, a seal skin would have been turned inside out and blown up to make the buoy. He'll carve a representation from whale bone.

Another piece features a shaman with rough teeth and inside his mouth, a glimpse of a tongue. The shaman will hold traditional dancing sticks like those used in ancient times to call sea animals for the hunt.

Eventually, Stone said, he wants to create art using only traditional materials and tools, like a drill shaft secured in a mouthpiece and twirled with a bow. For now, he stays busy in his rough little studio, drawing on both the old and modern worlds.

"Once I start working there making stuff like that, I can't stop," he said.

Lisa Demer

Lisa Demer was a longtime reporter for the Anchorage Daily News and Alaska Dispatch News. Among her many assignments, she spent three years based in Bethel as the newspaper's western Alaska correspondent. She left the ADN in 2018.

ADVERTISEMENT